Latinx Identities and Civil Rights

The Latina/o Identities and Civil Rights Three-Year Seminar will commemorate 50 years of civil rights activism and the identities that emanated out of those cultural and political struggles. There are four main themes that will be covered as part of the seminar topic: labor, immigration, gender and sexuality, and race and poverty. The seminar will address these topics as a way to better understand both historic and contemporary movements for civil rights in the U.S.

The Latino demographic boom of the last twenty years makes this seminar topic particularly relevant to contemporary scholarship in the humanities. Latinos now make up 17 percent of the total U.S. population and are slated to surpass Anglos by 2050. The demographic shift that the country—and especially Texas—are experiencing demands that scholars pay attention to the issues and politics that most directly affect this population.

2015 marks the 50th anniversary of two important events: the United Farm Worker boycott in central California and the passing of the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act of 1965. The following years, 2017 and 2018, mark the 50-year anniversaries of the Bilingual Education Act (1967) and the Poor People’s Campaign (1968). Both events fundamentally altered Mexican American and Puerto Rican politics and brought them into the national consciousness in ways not seen before.